It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "Astral America" (1986; tr. 1988).

Quotation

Life itself is a quotation.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian author. Heard by Jean Baudrillard at a lecture given in Paris. Quoted in: Baudrillard, Cool Memories, ch. 5 (1987; tr. 1990).

• _Cool Memories_ MP3 (192k) by Atomu Shinzu off of _Cool Memories_ 12" (1993)

New York

There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "New York" (1986; tr. 1988).

Fiction

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "Utopia Achieved" (1986; tr. 1988). Baudrillard is referring specifically to the European experience. The American way of life, he says, is "spontaneously fictional, since it is a transcending of the imaginary in reality."
 
 

Reality

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. … The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Simulations, pt. 2, "The Hyperrealism of Simulation" (1983). Baudrillard goes on to say, "Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream."

The Consumer Society

Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows… the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity…mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. "Consumer Society," in La Société de Consommation (1970; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. by Mark Poster, 1988).

Information

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 5 (1987; tr. 1990).
 
 

Yuppies

The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of performance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "The End of US Power?" (1986; tr. 1988).

Festivals

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "Astral America" (1986; tr. 1988).

Scholars and Scholarship

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 5 (1987; tr. 1990).

Television

There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, "Astral America" (1986; tr. 1988).

Vision

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 2 (1987; tr. 1990).

The End of the World

The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 5 (1987; tr. 1990).

• jangle pop track _It's The End Of The World As We Know It_ MP3 by REM off of _Document_ 12" (1987)

Cities and City Life

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. _Cool Memories_, ch. 3 (1987; tr. 1990).

film _The Matrix_ (vhs/ntsc) (1999)

• when Neo sells his illegal virtual reality programs to his customers, he shows us his stash - located in a hollowed out edition (i.e. simulated book) of _Simulacra And Simulation_ by Jean Baudrillard   - the chapter is "On Nihilism"
• Neo opens "Simulacra and Simulation" to the chapter "On nihilism," which has curiously been printed in the middle of the book, whereas really it is the last chapter of Baudrillard's actual book. And, also curiously, the chapter starts on the left-hand page, not the right-hand page as normal. In that chapter, Baudrillard asserts that revolution is pointless because the system that operates our hyperreal world will automatically and effortlessly neutralize it: "Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic."

Yet, Neo has sliced into that specific chapter with a knife, cutting out its substance and inserting instead a copy of his own software. Neo is rejecting Baudrillard's message, implicitly asserting that he can and will rebel against the system in order to achieve his enlightenment or "gnosis." This is an adumbration of what is to come in Reloaded and Revolutions. For Neo will discover that the organized escape of humans from the Matrix into Zion is simply a transfer from one virtual world to another, in precisely the manner anticipated by the Architect of the Matrix. But Neo will find a way to break out of this seemingly nihilistic prison. - Ray Kurzweil

• dark dub track _Simulacra_ MP3 by Meat Beat Manifesto off of _Subliminal Sandwich_ on Play It Again (1996)

• Morpheus: "Welcome to the desert of the real" - quoting Baudrillard.
• From the screenplay draft: Morpheus: "You have been living inside Baudrillard's vision, inside the map, not the territory."
• track _Post Post-Modern Man (Neo Post-Modern Mix)_ MP3 by Devo

In one of his apocalyptic theoretical tracts, Jean Baudrillard called this mediated rapture "the ecstasy of communication."  He argues that the "harsh and inexorable light of information and communication" has now mastered all spheres of existence, producing an omnipresent system of media flows that has colonized the interior of the self.  Passion, intimacy, and psychological depth evaporate, and we wind up "only a pure screen, a switching center of all networks of influence."  No longer subjects of our own experience, we abandon ourselves to a cold and schizophrenic fascination with an infoglut he likens to a "microscopic pornography of the universe."  Though one suspects that Monsieur Baudrillard might do well to cancel his premium cable service, his dour prophecy certainly resonates.  Many of us have indeed enclosed our nervous systems within a vibrating artificial matrix of cell phones, pagers, voice mail systems, networked laptops, and ever-present terminal screens, which monitor us as much as we monitor them.
- Erik Davis - _Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information_  p. 278-279

" We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation.  Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the interface and the reduplication of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens."

 - Jean Baudrillard, _Xerox & Infinity_.

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